A Rotten time

The Sex Pistols come back to nail their legacy

by Jon Garelick

I know my tonsils are fried, but I'm better than anything you've ever seen," Johnny Rotten announced a few songs into the Sex Pistols' show for 7300 at Great Woods last Saturday. No one was disagreeing.

Twenty years after they changed rock-and-roll history, and 18 years after their last live performances, the Sex Pistols are touring with what may be the best oldies show of the summer. Probably more than any other band, the Pistols were of the moment that produced them. They were artistic and political insurrectionists who, as others have pointed out, gave England a collective nervous breakdown. When they imploded on their first US tour it was a self-fulfilling prophecy; by their own proclamation, they were supposed to be the end of rock and roll, so it only made sense that they would come to a screeching halt as a band.

Typically, they've undercut any potential criticism by calling this the "Filthy Lucre Tour" (and releasing Filthy Lucre Live, recorded at one of the tour's early dates). For some, it's a travesty, a sellout. For others, like punk chronicler Jon Savage (writing in Spin), it's a completion of "unfinished business."

So the Pistols are finally touring as a real band, cashing in on the "alternative" revolution they helped create. They're playing with a real bassist, founding member (and Pistols co-songwriter) Glen Matlock, replacing Sid Vicious. And it's as a band, rather than as a nostalgia act, that they succeeded on Saturday night.

Are the Pistols a better group than, say, Social Distortion? Do they kick out the jams better than young punks Green Day? On both counts, probably not. Social Distortion and other bands deliver a more precise, finely honed sonic assault. And Green Day are, well, younger. But Rotten's proud declaration of "fat, 40, and back" is overstated. For one thing, guitarist Steve Jones is bulked-up and scary-looking. Matlock is as dark-eyed handsome as the young David Byrne. From the 15th row drummer Paul Cook still looks boyish and pounds mightily.

The only one who really looks like shit is Rotten. With his hair brushed up into a red and orange troll-doll doo, and wearing a striped blue smock with matching pants and a flowing blouse, his eyes bugging out as he spat lyrics at the crowd, he might have been an account executive who'd suffered a late-onset schizo breakdown one day at the office. But of course it's Rotten who makes the band. Jones scraped appropriately nasty chords and leads out of his metal-flake blue guitar all night, and Matlock and Cook supplied the rhythmic muscle. Yet this outfit isn't about jaw-dropping virtuosity; it's about the songs and Rotten's bleating delivery of them, and his command of the stage.

This, after all, is the best material he's ever had, and he knows it. Even as familiar chord progressions keep popping up in song after song, there's Rotten, pegging each word like a stud gun nailing a two-by-four. The changes may be familiar (a friend commented that the Monkees' "Stepping Stone" might be the best song the Pistols do), but nothing else is. Rotten shifts from singing to his own brand of song-speech in mid phrase, jumping into a higher register ("Got to solve your mystery"), salaciously fluttering those glorious rolling r's ("Down, down, dr-r-r-raging me down"), and yelping in his distinctive sicko vibrato.

You could make some small complaints about his singing. Maybe he started "Holidays in the Sun" a tad too high for his fried tonsils and lost some projection. And his deep growls on "Liar" buried some lyrics. But here's someone who, unlike 99 percent of white rock-and-rollers, owes virtually nothing to African-American Southern inflections in his delivery -- unless it's his sense of variable pitch. He's a nasty Brit and he sounds like one, and the comparison to Laurence Olivier's Richard III as a rock-and-roll singer is accurate. When he sings, "You thought we were faking/We were all just money-making" or "Too many people support us," he nails the consonants and they stay nailed. He strutted like a spastic marionette, but with a requisite bump and grind every so often, conducting the lyrics of "EMI" with his hands, lecturing a would-be gobber in the mosh pit: "If you continue to spit at me, I will put you in hospital. I don't know where you learned that shit, but you got it wrong!"

The band pretty much played the new live album verbatim, which is pretty much a remake of their one studio LP, Never Mind the Bollocks . . . Here's the Sex Pistols. Add to that a B-side like "Satellite," the Monkees cover, and, as the last encore, Jonathan Richman's "Roadrunner," with a bit of nastiness thrown at WBCN's boss, a pioneering US Pistols supporter ("Fuck off, Eeed-uh-puss!"), and you have an oldies show all right, but with songs and a performer who endure. Who knows whether the Pistols will make a go of it with new material? Or whether, like Little Richard doing "Tutti Frutti" 40 years later, they'll be playing "Pretty Vacant" in 2016? If so, just like Richard, they might still be worth seeing.